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Timothy Burke. Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996.

Timothy Burke, in Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women, "takes up the challenge" of understanding the interrelationship between colonialism, consumer capitalism, and the consciousness of "needs" in Zimbabwe. (2) He tries to assess different theories of the "social construction" of desire, focusing specifically on the purchase and consumption of consumer goods made for use on the body. It is both a history of the construction of consumer "needs" in Zimbabwe in the last two centuries and an attempt to understand the ways that "political economy, cultural studies, and critical theory" may be brought "into productive dialogue with each other." (5)

He contends that to understand postwar commodity culture and "African" identities in Zimbabwe, it is necessary to study the prior social and cultural history of "hygiene," the development of merchant capital and manufacturing in the colonial period, and the use of advertising in the post-World War II and post-colonial periods. Although perceived as part of "common sense," contemporary "African" values of bodily cleanliness, he argues, are the result of these historical processes. (9) Drawing on neo-Marxian notions of commodity fetishism and commodification, he believes that consumer capitalism exploited, to a certain extent, previous traditions of both colonial cultural hegemony and native resistance. Yet he maintains that a domination model of cultural diffusion is insufficient, because it fails to adequately account for the construction of stable "needs" and multiple "native" forms of contestation and appropriation. He therefore utilizes Foucault’s notion of power as "both restricting and productive," but he retains Marxian analysis of the negative "political" implications of "colonial rule and capitalist domination." (7)

The book is organized thematically into three parts in order to juxtapose these historical and theoretical contributions. The first part looks at the social and cultural history of hygiene from the nineteenth century to the 1970s, looking as a Foucauldian would at the social construction of "native" desires for clean bodies. They result from notions of cleanliness that predate colonization, from colonial and missionary efforts to "civilize" the "African" people, and from "native" efforts to appropriate cleanliness for multiple forms of self-advancement. Chapters three and four look at the history of manufacturing and commerce, again including precolonial forms, colonial (racially segregated) forms, and the development of an extensive "African" market in the postwar years. Attention is paid to "native" involvement and agency, but this part is particularly neo-Marxian. The final two chapters consider the postwar commodity culture made possible by these developments. Chapter five focuses on its hegemonic aspects: the role of advertising and market research in the "marketing of whiteness." (158) The final chapter focuses on the ways that natives adopted, reinvented, and rejected the commodities marketed to them.

Burke is careful to provide the native Zimbabwean people with agency, reacting against theories, like most readings of Marx, that see domination exercised by hegemonic agents on passive subjects. For him, Africans are subjected to forces that impinge on their choices, but they are actively involved in the processes. (10) Yet he is also careful to avoid "celebrating" consumers who solely manipulate the images, objects and forms of identity that are presented to them. (7) To do so opens the "danger" of dismissing or de-emphasizing the "powerful political issues associated with Western global hegemony," and thus merely reproducing the status quo. He thus seeks to revise radical critical social theory in the light of contemporary post-structural theories of agency, without losing its project of social justice. (215-216)

To make this argument, Burke assembles a truly impressive variety of sources. In the introduction, Burke gives priority to oral history interviews made between 1990 and 1991, including both interviews of hegemonic elites such as manufacturers and advertisers, and urban individuals of various backgrounds and social groups affected by these pressures. Yet various forms of written evidence supplement these oral testimonies: archival records of government agencies and various social and business organizations, various articles and advertisements found in local newspapers, works of fiction, published works of participants, and a wide range of secondary sources actively engaged with in the text and notes. Therefore perceptions of "needs" voiced by native informers are deeply contextualized in larger social and cultural processes.

The book is truly an impressive attempt to retain agency within a work calling for social justice. The case is strongly made for both the hegemonic practices of colonial and capitalist interests and the efforts made by native Zimbabwean actors to participate in and resist these practices. His fear that to focus solely on the latter might distract from a careful attention to the former processes is plausible. Yet one must still ask, given his evidence, how much of a role colonial and capitalist interests played in these developments. Cultural values of "cleanliness" and body presentation predated colonialism and capitalism, (23-31) colonial efforts at "civilizing" native populations was ambiguous at best, (99-104) and capitalist efforts, especially after World War II, to a great extent expanded already established cultural values and social institutions. (63-65, 162-163) Native populations engaged in relationships with these new forms, as with forms of merchant exchange and "outside" influences for many centuries. Modern forms may have produced more fundamental changes in native customs and practices in a shorter period of time, but it is not at all clear, especially from oral evidence, that most "Africans" felt that the new processes permitted anything other than a new range of possibilities. (esp. 198-202)

This raises a fundamental question for oral history, but also for cultural history more generally. Oral history permits the historian to "give voice" to the people studied, avoiding the misconceptions or "silences" found in previous readings. Yet despite efforts to avoid Marx’s notion of "false consciousness," (6-7) Burke is still confronted with informants who "fail" to see the larger implications of their values and practices. It is therefore the role of the historian, by contextualizing these "desires," to show ultimate "disempowerment" in perceived "empowerment." To do this, Burke endeavors to participate in active dialogue with fellow scholars and social critics, but he "interviews," rather than dialogues with, the native Zimbabweans. He has something to offer in this dialogue, but his interest in "social justice" prevents him from listening to how this might be understood by the Zimbabweans themselves. If erring somewhat in the opposite direction, Eileen Suarez Findlay’s more solely Foucauldian treatment of Puerto Rican prostitution in her book Imposing Decency shows more concern both to listen to the needs and desires of native informants and to consider the context of institutions and values that construct these forms of identity. It might or might not be "better politics," but it is "better history," in that it pays more attention to "grass roots" processes than to non-interrogated ideals of future transcendence.